Venom’s Story

(TW: Sexual Assault)

For me, I got a lot more in tune with my menstrual cycle over the last few years. On August 1st, 2020 I got raped at my job and then my entire community fell apart afterwards, and I remember it was like early pandemic. My housing also started falling through.

The next job I found was awful. I was literally getting beaten, it was a terrible nannying gig where I wasn't getting paid. I was getting spit on and called names, and it was just the worst. I had no community, and it was the point in my life when my landlord was being abusive.

I was so crushed. I remember I was walking at Crescent Beach and it was the first day of my period, but it hadn't started yet. And my womb hurt so much, I just couldn't walk, I just needed to sit down on a rock. And I really listened to my womb for the first time ever.

I heard an actual voice, and it felt like it was coming from Pele, the volcano goddess from Hawaii. The voice said, “You don't need to fix anything right now, but you need to listen to us.” And I just knew the “us” was my reproductive system and my ancestors and the earth spirits and this primal energy of volcanoes and deep transformation that's well below the surface.

And I've had this relationship to volcanoes. I've had this relationship to raspberry leaf from all of this. I know that some of the downstream effects of actually listening to my womb was that I need to get this IUD out of my body. I think it's amazing to have access to birth control, but I felt like it had sopped up a lot of toxic energy, not even just from my assault, but from really toxic, shitty people who weren't respecting my body. 

So I got my IUD out and then for the first time in my entire life, since I went on birth control when I was sixteen, for the first time in my entire sexually active history, my adulthood, I was fertile. And there was a lot of fear in that. And I have since then had my first pregnancy scare with someone who was a total fuck boy about it. But all of those shitty people are out of my life now. But it's been interesting being in my fertility and really listening to my womb and it's the perfect place for me to be right now, where I really like having my blood. I feel like my blood is not just cleaning the lining of my uterus, but every time it feels like an upgrade to my system where I'm really raw and emotional for a few days and I'm needier in a way that I feel entitled to.

I found out recently that I have anemia. I had always been baseline anxious for a while and had these other anemia symptoms, then I found out just taking a vitamin every day could radically change it. And these sorts of insights on how to be in good relationship with my body have really come from listening to my body at the most painful parts where all I wanted to do was check out. All I wanted to do was be numb. And I feel really powerful now. I have a connection to my body where I can literally hear actual voices from my body, parts of what they need and get these intuitive hits about what's going on with me. 

I've yet to really see this kind of connection in the other people who I have these conversations with and I think that really sucks. I hope someday we’ll live in a world where consent and bodily connection becomes something we actually teach in schools. And I think the hardest part of my assault was that I checked out and I did the appease stress response and I felt bad that I wasn't fighting. I'm slowly learning not to hate myself for what other people are doing wrong. 

-Venom, they/them, 26